


Slave Stories

by vocativecomma



Series: The Serena 'verse [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Meta, Slavery, femmslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 11:49:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/899977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vocativecomma/pseuds/vocativecomma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens when the stories we love turn around and trap us, and how can we break free of them?   A slave, who has red too much slavefic for her own good, wrestles with these questions and confronts her Mistress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slave Stories

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by a common pattern I've found in slavefic, where the d/s elements remain, even when the slave and master have supposedly entered into a consensual relationship. To my knowledge, few writers have explored how nonconsensual slavery and consensual BDSM slavery games can get tangled up in each other and create confusion, so I wanted to try my hand at it. I might consider expanding this 'verse. Appologies for the shit-tacular world-building.

Serena is supposed to be spending the morning packing for her holiday with the woman who owns her, but she just can’t bring herself to begin. First, she dusts the bedroom and sitting room, even though there isn’t any dust. Then she spends fifteen minutes pensively staring out the window. Then she spends another fifteen minutes flipping through the thick travel itinerary. The travel agency is old-fashioned, so it came in the mail, on thick, luscious paper that probably cost a fortune, now that the forests are almost gone. At the top of each page are their names: “Ms. And Ms. Nidaux.” There is no mention of slaves or mistresses anywhere. 

“Isn’t that dishonest, pretending like we’re a married couple?” Serena had asked. 

“It’s better this way,” Kate had said. “Most people don’t take their slaves on romantic getaways.”

Most people don’t pretend to be married to their slaves, either, Serena thinks, especially if the slave is Ectrian. But she keeps her thoughts to herself. Kate has reassured her that no one in Marenga will bat an eyelash, and she tries her best to believe her.

At ten o’clock, Serena finds that she is hungry again, even though she ate breakfast two hours before, so she goes to the kitchen, where she boils water for tea and eats two slices of toast slathered with mulberry jam. 

Finally, at quarter to eleven, anxiety sets in. Kate is due home at noon, and though she is unlikely to get angry, she’d still wonder why on Earth Serena hadn’t started their packing yet, and Serena knows she would be unable to come up with a satisfactory answer. 

Once Serena turns her mind off and starts grabbing bathing suits and hairbrushes and shoes off shelves and out of drawers, she realizes that the whole ordeal is taking her half as long as she had anticipated. Kate has about a million t-shirts with absurd slogans written on them, and Serena has a sizeable pile of less ostentatious shirts, and a few pretty sundresses. That is the advantage of beach holidays, she supposes; there is no need to please anyone but themselves. But Kate had mentioned that they do have reservations at a fancy restaurant on one of the nights, and to bring something nice. After packing the ice blue sheath dress she knows Kate especially likes, she goes on a search for her dangly pearl earrings. They aren’t in her jewelry box; they aren’t on the dresser (or in any of the drawers); they aren’t on her nightstand; they aren’t on the floor. Frustrated, and slightly nervous, Serena investigates Kate’s side of the bed. She is about to open the top drawer of her nightstand when a familiar-looking paperback catches her eye. My Slave, My Love is written in crimson letters across its cover. 

Before the broken treaty with Malya changed everything, before Kate’s father captured her and gave her to his daughter as a spoil of war, Serena used to enjoy slave stories. She discovered them the summer she was fourteen, when her mother unceremoniously shipped her off to her grandmother in the city, who turned out to be harmlessly senile. Thankfully, on the fourth day of her stay in purgatory, Serena discovered the trunk in the attic, which was filled to the brim with every kind of lurid romance novel you could imagine. But Serena soon abandoned all of them, in favor of the slave stories. She loved everything about them: the beautiful men and women on the covers and their ludicrous outfits; the way the masters would start out firm and unyielding, but then melt like butter; the proud humility of many of the slaves; and, of course, the predictability of the happy endings, in which the slave became the master’s concubine or consort, or, in rare cases, his husband. . 

Serena backs away from the offending bedside table as if she has been burnt. In the stories, the deeper the love between the slave and his master grew, the more they both forgot about the little, insignificant problem that one of them owned the other. In the stories, the master was always unspeakably kind, going to great lengths to demonstrate that he saw the slave as a lover and an equal. But, in many of the stories, the master retained his dominance in the bedroom—with the slave’s enthusiastic consent and participation, of course. In the stories, these slaves always trusted their masters completely. They did not mind when their masters whispered “mine!” into their collarbones in the middle of the night, and even when their masters freed them, they still seemed to craved submission.

Serena and her mistress had fallen in love, just like in the stories, albeit in a much more understated fashion. Serena had started to spend less and less time in the servant’s quarters and more and more time in Kate’s room. Gradually, her possessions began to inhabit the nightstand at the other side of Kate’s bed, and her clothes slowly but surely migrated to Kate’s closet, and one day, Serena grabbed the last dress from the room she shared with Millie, and she never slept there again. Without a word, Millie started to serve Kate and Serena their meals in the dining room, and that was that. 

Aside from a five minute conversation, when they agreed on umbrella as their safeword, there were no agonizing discussions about how the ground rules between them had changed. Kate is many things, but a processor is not one of them. There was no magical moment when Kate proclaimed them equals in love, or when Kate permitted Serena to address her by her given name. Instead, for Serena, there are many moments of intense, suffocating tension, where the unspoken hangs thick and muggy between them. Serena never knows which Kate she will encounter: Kate- the- lover or Kate-the-mistress or, worst of all, Kate-somewhere-in-between. Typically, Kate- the-mistress is confined to the bedroom, and she immediately morphs back into Kate-the-lover, at the first hint of their safeword. But on Millie’s nights off, there is a tacit expectation that Serena will cook and serve dinner, and clean up afterwards, and when Kate entertains, which is rare, thank God, Serena serves the guests with Millie, and she takes her dinner in the kitchen, like any other servant or slave. On those occasions, she tries not to address Kate directly, because the word “mistress” always seems to get stuck in her throat. 

When Kate has had a particularly trying day (which is more often, lately), Serena can sometimes detect the hint of an order tinging her requests for a cup of tea, or the book she has absent-mindedly left in another room. 

Serena is always worrying that she is going to slip, that she will play the wrong role at the wrong time, that she will mistake one Kate for another Kate, that she will overstep her bounds and forget her place and ask for too much, and crush the fragile thing between them. The slave stories made no mention of this endless sort of confusion. But Kate never gets angry, or raises her voice, and when she’s irritated, it’s only for a second, though Serena can spend five hours dwelling on that second. Kate’s almost perpetual calm just makes Serena’s fear churn faster, and when the fear is all dried up, she berates herself for being silly and ungrateful and overanalytical. 

Serena can’t help herself. Her gaze keeps straying back to that horrible book with its horrible title. Abandoning her search for the pearl earrings, she picks up her jewelry box and throws it into the suitcase with so much force that the damn thing bursts open, spraying its contents all over the impossibly plush carpet. Resignedly, Serena gets on her hands and knees and starts crawling around the room. 

That’s how Kate finds her, ten minutes later.

“I know the latch on that box is too fiddly,” she says. “Here, let me help you.” 

Kate rescues the last of the errant jewelry. “Are you all packed?” she asks. “The boat to Marenga leaves at six tomorrow morning.”

Serena nods.

“Good,” Kate says. “I can’t stand getting into a panic right before I have to leave because I can’t find this, that, or the other thing. You’re a star for putting up with my mess.”

“Did you want to bring this?” Serena says, pointing to the book on the nightstand. 

“Oh yes. That silly thing. Just some vapid beach reading.” 

Serena breathes deeply. Kate’s obliviousness is both one of the most and least attractive things about her. 

She must not have been doing as good a job concealing her expression as she thinks, for Kate gives her a questioning look. “Does my choice of reading matter bother you?” It’s just a stupid romance I picked up at the pharmacy.”

“No, it’s fine,” Serena says, grasping for a few dregs of levity. “The title is a little ridiculous, that’s all. Besides, weren’t we going to read aloud that twenty-first century classic I picked up at the library last week?”

“Yes, yes. Of course we will, but it seems so heady and convoluted. A little escapism every once in a while can’t hurt anyone.”

“Fair enough. “Serena pinches the book between two fingers and places it in the side pocket of Kate’s suitcase. 

 

But Kate’s obliviousness is still in the process of being dislodged. “It’s the whole slavery thing, isn’t it?” she asks. Her expression softens. “I guess it’s a bit insensitive of me, given the circumstances. I don’t have to bring it if it bothers you.”

Solicitous Kate has replaced oblivious Kate, and Serena feels her indignation slipping away. “It’s all right,” she says. “It’s just a story.”

That night, after Millie serves them a light dinner of spinach salad with shrimp and goji berries, Serena hopes Kate will want to go straight to bed. All her procrastination and rumination has given her a headache. Kate, however, has other plans. As soon as Serena enters their bedroom, Kate pounces, knocking her onto the bed and tying her hands to the bedposts with silken ropes, and then proceeds to bring her to orgasm four times, paying no heed to Serena’s half-hearted wriggling and her exaggerated cries of “stop” and “mercy!” 

Serena might be saying her lines, and dancing her dance, but she’s not really in her body. She’s read about subspace, that floaty place where submissives are supposed to go. But Serena isn’t floating. Just the opposite. She’s sinking under a stack of heavy books, their sharp corners poking her in the ribs, and she realizes dazedly that the books are the slave stories. They’ve come to trap her with their predictability, with their orderly scripts and clear boundaries and glossy pages.

“Goodnight, my prize,” Kate says, finally withdrawing her fingers from Serena’s vagina and untying her hands. Kate began using the endearment a week into Serena’s slavery, and it has stuck.

They lie awake for a while. Serena tries to close her eyes, to relax the muscles in her chest, but the slave stories are still there. 

“Kate?” 

“Hmm?” Kate murmurs, halfway to sleep.

For a moment, Serena considers postponing this conversation until the morning, when Kate will be more awake, but the darkness has made her brave.

“Don’t call me that again,” she says, in an unyielding tone she’s sure Kate has never heard from her before.

“Call you what?” 

“When you call me your prize. I don’t like it.”

“All right,” Kate says. “Goodnight, my Serena. Is that better?” 

Though Kate is barely concious, that same lingering possessiveness has not been fully scrubbed from her voice, and Serena doubts that it ever will.


End file.
